Mr. Healthcare Manager

So what immediately pops up in your profile if obvious. It’s your age. At 32 now (and boy do I wish I could the clock back and get back to my early 30s!), you would be 33 at matriculation and 35 at graduation. So while your GMAT is super impressive and 30 points over the HBS class median and your work experience is superb, your age is working against you at HBS. More typically, three to six years out of college seems to be the sweet spot for a Harvard MBA admit. Does the school accept folks who are 33 years of age? Yes. But they tend to be former military officers, doctors and lawyers. HBS used to annually publish a histogram of its newly enrolled students (the school’s admissions office was far more transparent under its former admissions chief Dee Leopold) but hasn’t done so for the past three years. I very much doubt, however, that there has been much change since then. Here’s the bad news: Only 7.2%, or 67 students in the Class of 2017, entered Harvard’s MBA program at age 30 or above, with eight to more than ten years of work experience. So once you hit 30, the odds quickly diminish for an admit. At exactly 30 years of age, only 2.7%, or 25 people, were admitted. At 31, only 19 got in, just 2.0%. At 32 and up, just 23 students were admitted, 2.5% of the class. I would bet that at 33 years of age, it is even less than 2.5%. Now some of this if a function of the applicant pool. Even so, there is a belief that the older you are, the more set you are in your views and less likely to be fully shaped by the HBS MBA experience. I would think that your best option is INSEAD among the schools you are targeting and INSEAD would be a great perch from which to land an MBB job.